Invisible desires: Homoerotic racism and its homophobic critique in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

Because of the confessional character of this invented narrative, the desires that he imputes to this figure represent the white male desires that narrator has been asked to satisfy in his earlier exchanges. What this imagined character wants, first of all, is for the invisible man to acknowledge verbally the hierarchy between them. He asks the question, "Look at me, black boy, what kind of man am I?" To which the narrator replies: "You're a white man" (254). He also demands that the invisible man specify his own racial identity:

"And he said, 'All right, all right, so I'm a white man, and what are you?"' "And what you say then, boy?" [Mary] asked. "I said, 'I'm colored, sir,' but it seemed it made him very angry.... His face changed while I was looking at it fast." "Yeah, he wanted you to call yourself a nigger." (254)

But the self-naming to which he wishes the invisible man to submit involves an acceptance of a very specific definition of what, exactly, a "nigger" is:

"Well he became very angry and said, 'That's right, you're a black, stinking, lowdown nigger bastard that's probably got the syph and I'm white and you're supposed to do whatever I say, understand?"' (254; emphasis added)

To be the "nigger" for the white man is not only to accept and acknowledge one's racially subordinate status, it is more precisely to relinquish authority over one's body-to allow one's body to do whatever the white man says it should do.

The white man's desire to impose his will upon the actions of the invisible man is presented, however, as merely a means by which he can achieve another end. After the narrator supplies the correct racial answer to the query, "Look at me, black boy, what kind of man am I?" the man quickly demands: "That's right, but what other kind of man am I?" (254). The narrator explains to Mary that though he was initially baffled by this question, he quickly came to understand its meaning:

I was thinking about trying to run past him, when all at once he jammed his hand in his pocket and brought out a big roll of bills. He said, "Now nigger, I want you to stand still while I put this twenty-dollar bill in your pocket." And I looked at him, and saw that the side of his mouth was twitching and his voice was shaky. I had never heard a man's voice sound like that. (254-55)

Eventually, the invisible man tells Mary, "he reached out and touched me and I swung the bottle at him and ran" (256).

What leads this imaginary white character-who is both a white man and "that other kind of man"-to coerce the invisible man into assuming the subordinate position of "nigger" is ultimately a homosexual desire to use his body as a source of erotic pleasure. Put more generally, this exchange suggests something like the following: white men seek to subordinate black men because that subordination enables them to use the black male body to gratify an erotic desire that is essentially homosexual. While the homophobic logic of this assertion is disturbing enough, what is even more disturbing is the cohesive force it exerts as a whole over the initial version of the novel. For this fabricated story is not only shadowed by the narrator's past encounters-it not only mirrors "actual happening[s] ... that had occurred sometime, somewhere in the past"-it also adumbrates the "happening" that will occur in the future: his seduction into the political machinery of the Brotherhood.